What if the NFL Was Run Like the Government School System?

Regular readers know that the two things that get me most excited are the Georgia Bulldogs and the fight against a bloated public sector that is ineffective in the best of circumstances and more often than not is a threat to our freedoms.

So you will not be surprised to know that I am delighted that former Georgia Bulldog star Fran Tarkenton (who also happened to play in the NFL) has a superb piece in the Wall Street Journal ripping apart the inherent inefficiency of government-run monopoly schools.

Here is the key passage.

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct. Let’s face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt? No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn’t get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money. Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: “They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans.” The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn’t help.

This sounds absurd, of course, but Mr. Tarkenton goes on to explain that this is precisely how government schools operate.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real-life American public education system. Teachers’ salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn’t rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they’ve been teaching. That’s it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you’re demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation’s children. Inflation-adjusted spending per student in the United States has nearly tripled since 1970. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we spend more per student than any nation except Switzerland, with only middling results to show for it.

Actually, I will disagree with the last sentence of this excerpt. We’re not even getting “middling results.” Here’s a chart from an earlier post showing that we’ve gotten more bureaucracy and more spending but no improvement over the past 40 years.

No it isn’t free. Now imagine that everyone has to pay something for those buildings and salaries and whatever else. And there’s another, better league you’d prefer to watch, but you can’t afford both, and you can’t get out of paying for the first one.

I think Tarkenton oversimplifies the problem.
But let me use his analogy. What if took all these superb athletes and trained them, from the time they were young, to play volleyball. Then, we put them in pads and sent them out onto the field in front of 78,000 fans and a television audience. They’d never actually played football before, but there they are, not even sure of the rules.Would we find their play disappointing? Probably. In fact, it would be laughable. And after a while, some of those players, after a quarter or two of booing and hissing, would just kind of give up and go through the motions.
But that is what we are doing to the teachers. Our schools of education are teaching them constructivist concepts that are great in the education journals but at best laughable in the public school classroom.
One part of the solution is to remove the influence of the Columbia University School of Education from all educational policies, including what is taught in our collegiate schools of education. In face, nobody with an Ed.D. should be allowed to have any policy-making position at all.
Of course, I am leaving out some of the other problems and issues, but the idea that THE solution is to evaluate teachers and increase their pay or fire them based on how well they teach is an invitation to those personality types that want to be petty tyrants. Evaluating effective teaching is not as simple as checking the stats sheet. In the NFL, you can see that Kevin Kolb has a 45% completion percentage whereas Drew Brees’ is 70%. In the NFL they keep up with dropped passes, holding penalties committed, sacks. Wouldn’t it be great to track stats like that in the public schools, but there is way more complexity.
Yes, we know when our kids have a bad teacher, but often we don’t know when we have a good teacher who hasn’t been properly trained.
When we take on a problem like education, we don’t benefit anyone by oversimplifying the problem.

Professional football players (and this may be a surprise) love playing football. I’m sure they love money, too, but if they all made the league minimum, it wouldn’t lead to a decline in performance because their motivation isn’t derived solely from the check they get at the end of the week. That’s why they played football in college, and in high school, and in Pop Warner without getting a check. They did it for the love of the game.

People don’t become teachers for the money. That 25k a year salary isn’t the main draw for people who just graduated college with 30k loans. Teachers have an internalized motivation to teach. They get joy from it. Most teachers love their job despite shitty pay, shitty hours, and a shitty reputation given to them by people like Mr. Tarkenton.

Pay incentives might work for the people who don’t really want to be teachers. That number is small, but definitely present. But for those people, merit pay will lead to an increase in teaching to the test, or whatever measurement of quality is given and won’t lead to true education.

There are huge flaws in our education system, but tenure and unions are often a scapegoat.

Now I’d like to see a high-school teacher explain that to his/her students, and initiate a stimulating discussion. But that would take guts. The type of guts that narrow-worldviewers like Matt Damon have yet to discover.

Question: If we are to hire, fire, pay, and promote teachers according to an evaluation process, then who will do the evaluating? If we leave it in the hands of principals, then the evaluators are one of the least competant segments of education. In the hands of parents? Then those with axes to grind will have the loudest voices. Ed. profs? It is they who are responsible for many of the problems in the first place?
In short, be careful what you wish for.

Holding up the NFL as a free-market model is a complete joke. Contrast it with European soccer:

1. Your team finished in at the bottom of the league.

European soccer: Your team is booted down to lower league. You can come back when you’ve finished at the top of that league.

NFL: They not only reward your failure by letting you stay in the top league, but they give the best draft picks!

2. You are an 18 year-old phenom.

European soccer: You can negotiate with whatever team you want, for whatever salary you want. You own your labor. Start tomorrow.

NFL: You must go to college first, despite having no interest in attending class. You then must enter the draft, and play for whatever team picks you. You do not have control over your labor, and your salary will be limited to negotiations with that one team, which means you cannot take competing offers for your services until your contract is up.

“Most teachers love their job despite shitty pay, shitty hours, and a shitty reputation given to them by people like Mr. Tarkenton.”

Nonsense. By and large, teacher pay is not “shitty”. In my state, the average teacher salary is above the median household income (and keep in mind household income might include multiple incomes). Two teachers married to each other could make well over 100k by the middle of their careers and somewhere in the range of 150k-170k by the time they retire. Sure, starting pay is often low, but so what? I have friends who graduated with business degrees that started their careers in the low 20’s. And education degrees are some of the easiest to obtain at any university. Why a relatively weak student who spends 5 or 6 years obtaining one of the easiest degrees at the university should get paid 40 or 50k right out of the box is beyond me.

Aside from that, benefits, retirement, and job security are much better for teachers than nearly any other profession. You’re kidding yourself if you think teachers don’t consider these things and just do it for the love of teaching. Obviously, teachers like to teach, or they wouldn’t do it, by and large. But they’re hardly special in this regard. They love teaching because it’s a relatively easy job with a nice work environment and few demands. And their “bosses” have relatively little power over them.

And “shitty hours”? You’re kidding, right? Shorter days, very few evenings, no weekends, all Holidays off, no summers, a couple hours of planning periods (or socializing time) per day. Awful, I know. It’s practically slavery. Sure, we all hear stories about that teacher who spends hours upon hours of their evenings and weekends grading papers and updating lesson plans. Funny part is, I’ve never met this teacher, and I know quite a few teachers. I have, however, met teachers who sit their kids down in front of Disney movies every Friday afternoon so they can get their grading done to have their weekends free. If a teacher has to spend that much time on the evenings and weekends doing work, they’re either doing it because they want to, or they’re doing something wrong. Besides, how much time they spend outside of the school day is irrelevant to performance. Some of the best teachers I ever had were my high school math teachers. They were good because they were excited about the material and knew it well. I guarantee that these teachers spent very little time outside of regular school hours doing work. They didn’t need to.

Obviously there are highly intelligent, dedicated, motivated, and caring teachers out there. But for the most part teachers are just people, prone to the same flaws as the rest of us. They get tired, bored, irritable, etc. just like the rest of us. They have good days and bad days. They’re not saints simply because of the occupation they’ve chosen.

Mullaney wrote, “You’re kidding yourself if you think teachers don’t consider these things and just do it for the love of teaching. Obviously, teachers like to teach, or they wouldn’t do it, by and large.”
Indeed, many students get an education certificate, a difficult though not intellectually challenging process, because mom and dad have told them it would be something to fall back on, a nice safe profession in case their desire to be the next Meryl Streep or the next Tim Conway doesn’t work out.

Teacher evaluations, combined with merit pay, are indeed absolutely necessary. for those who say teachers and football players are not motivated by money I reply:

Football players are not motivated just by money, but money helps, Otherwise we would not have contract negociation holdouts by bigtime players every season. Sometimes it is not just money, but money also becomes a measure of status and worth, so the best players want to be paid better than the players that are slightly less good than them.

The same can work for teachers. Giving the better teaches merit raises doesn’t just give them more money, but also more status, and publically identifies them as somebody of worth. That can be a powerful motivator.

richard40 wrote, “Teacher evaluations, combined with merit pay, are indeed absolutely necessary.” That’s fine to make that argument, but please then show me an effective teacher evaluation tool. Teacher evaluations, when tied to merit pay, become, more often than not, a tool for administrators to reward their friends and punish the people they don’t like. I’d be really interested in seeing just how you plan to objectively evaluate teacher effectiveness.

As for saying you can’t have teacher evaluations because evaluations are all flawed, the way out of that is to have multiple evaluation criteria. If you combine multiple criteria, than any bias in one component is washed out by others. The main criteria I would use is:

1. Evaluation by the principle. Yes, you can have a bad principle, but the way out for that is school choice and evaluation systems for the school itself, with dismissal of principles of bad or failing schools. Giving the principle input into teachers evaluations at least allows a good principle a real tool to effect change. And if the principle is biased against a good teacher, the bias will be washed out by the other evaluations.
2. Parental review. Yes some parents can be biased, but not all of them in a class. This type of evaluation is quite important for college teachers, no reason it should not be for K-12.
3. Give a small plus for teachers that give lower average grades, and a minus for higher than average grades. This will combat grade inflation. It will also discourage teachers from buying better parental evaluations, or avoiding complaints, by giving out higher than deserved grades. You would have to discount this for gifted classes, where you would expect higher grades, or better yet just add a gradepoint for gifted classes, and grade with a normal average.
4. Test scores. If combined with all these other evaluations, it will not pay to just teach to the test, since excessive time spent doing that will detract from all the other evaluations.
5. Peer review. Teachers must rank all the other teachers from top to bottom. Keep each teachers evaluation of other teachers secret to prevent intimidation, especially from the union for senior or credentialed teachers, from coloring those evaluations. Teachers normally know who the good and bad teachers are, but are too intimidated by the union to finger them.
6. Test for subject matter expertice. Can the English teacher write well, does the math/sciance/history know math/science/history. The easiest way to do this might be to just give the teacher the AP test for their subject area. And every teacher should get a test for basic reading, writing, and speaking skills, and for English language competancy.

Factors that should NOT factor into evaluations:
1. Seniority. It just encourages time serving drones and union hacks. If a teacher does gain skill from experiance, it will be shown in the other evaluations above.
2. Education credentials and degrees. As others have said, many of the things taught in education schools today are actually worse than useless. If a teacher actually DOES learn something useful in an education school, it will show up in the other evaluations I identified above.
3. Testing for knowledge of education theory and jargon. Same as for the previous point. If this stuff really helps a teacher, it will show up in the classroom.

2. Parental review.
Such evaluations would be as useless as, and perhaps even more useless than, the end-of-course surveys given to students in college classes. Good parental evaluations would take parents a significant amount of time, including visiting the classroom on more than one occasion during the year. And even then, many parents continue to have an adversarial relationship with teachers, as evidenced by some of the insane complaints brought to school boards.

3. Average grades.
I have heard this argument in college settings: lower grades = a more rigorous, more demanding, better teacher. It causes some teachers to shift the bell curve downward. It implies that a teacher cannot be rigorous and demanding and at the same time effective and inspirational. At the risk of being rude, I’ll stop right there.

4. Test scores.
So the teacher with the better students is automatically a better teacher?

5. Peer review.
How can I review my peers if I’m doing my job? How can I review my peers without going into the classroom? And I’m in a state where unions don’t control teachers, where collective bargaining is not even possible for teachers.

6. Test for subject matter expertice.
In six seasons in MLB, Charlie Manuel was a .198 hitter. I suppose that makes him a pretty lousy major league manager.

You are right that some way of eliminating the truly bad teachers must be found, and you are right that the kind of credentialing that teachers engage in is often meaningless. But your solution won’t work.

For instance, you don’t take into account the kind of material being taught. It is much easier for a chorus or band teacher to get good parental response than it is for an algebra teacher, but it’s easier for the algebra teacher to keep grades low. In face, if low grades are prioritized by the chorus teacher, the chorus teacher will soon be let go for lack of students.

This is an issue we need to keep working on, but over-simplifying isn’t the answer.

1. Sounds like you agree with me on the school principle evaluation. These other criteria are partly to offset concerns by others that a principle may have personal bias against an otherwise good teacher. I suspect most truly good teachers will do well on most of these criteria.

2. Parental review. I taught adjunct in college, and those student reviews were more informative and important than you might think. I got glowing reviews most of the time, even though I didn’t grade any higher than most, until one semester when outside job committments prevented me from giving my students the time they deserved, when my evaluations suffered, and I got laid off. For adjunct instructors they were often a prime criteria in hiring and firing. And parents do not have to sit in class all day to do an informative review. Just talk to your kid about what they think of the teacher, and review the teachers course material, and the way they grade homework and tests, and ask your kid about what they learned each day. I would have marks of average, above average, and below average, and instruct parents to mark average if they are not sure, and mark above for teachers they know are good, and below for those they know are bad.

3. Average grades. For great teachers that give out all A’s because every student actually learned all the material perfectly, they will probably have any penalty offset by good evaluations elsewhere. But most classes have at least some students that will not learn, even from a good teacher, and this factor ensures they get the C’s, D’s, and F’s they deserve. And as I said, it deters bad teachers from avoiding trouble and scrutiny by giving underserved high grades.

4. Test Scores. You can factor in differences in student quality by combining average scores with average improvement for each student from last year. Teachers with mostly good students will do well on the absolute score, while teachers with students that did poorly last year have a better chance for good improvement scores. Both at once should balance things out.

5. Peer review. Same as the parental review. Mark average if not sure, good for the teachers you know are good, and below for the ones you know are bad. Teachers talk a lot with each other, and with students talking about other teachers, and are capable of recognizing the very good and very poor teachers without sitting in class all day. I know that from my adjunct days, when most teachers knew who the good and bad teachers were. And if they dont think they know, just mark everybody average.

6. Subject matter. Notice I did not have subject matter requirements for principles (the equavalent of baseball managers and coaches) since they manage people and budgets, not teach, and should be evaluated on how well their team (the school) is doing. And lousy ball players may make good managers, but they still made lousy ballplayers. It might be that some lousy teachers may make good principles, but are still lousy teachers. All the good teachers I ever knew loved their subjects and knew them well. Their love and knowledge of their subject was part of the passion that made them good teachers.

And again I emphasise that any single one of these factors may be a lousy measure for one specific teacher, but any good teacher should manage to do well on most of them, and any bad teacher do poorly. Since all the factors are weighted together into a combined score, any imperfection in one measure should be offset by scores in the others. And my system definitely beats the current system of seniority and education credentials all to hell. My suspicion is that most education professionals that resist measures like this do so because they actually like the current failing seniority and credential system, rather than emphasising actual classroom performance.

2. “Just talk to your kid”: How many kids do you have? I am going through middle school for the fourth time, and I wouldn’t trust what a single one told me about their teachers, and all of them are good kids.
As for student evaluations, I generally get good reviews from my students. The administrators love the Likert-scale questions. I like the comments. The first are meaningless; the latter are sparse.
3. “Average grades.” I’ve seen too many faculty members try to use this as a reason for marking someone down.
4. “Test Scores.” And what happens when on test day a kid has to use the bathroom but the school rules won’t let him? What about the student whose parents just separated? What about. . . ? Why do such things affect a teacher’s evaluation?
5. “Peer review. And if they dont think they know, just mark everybody average.” This is what would happen except in the case where Mrs. B just broke off her affair with Mr. Q and she’s gonna show him a thing or two.
6. “Subject matter.” I think you missed my point on this. A person can know a lot about a subject and be a lousy teacher. A person can know less about a subject and still teach what he knows well. Charlie Manuel knows a lot about baseball, but he wasn’t a very good player. I know a lot more about soccer than I did when I was in college, but I was a much better player then (when I could still run).
“And my system definitely beats the current system of seniority and education credentials all to hell.”
I do have to agree with you on this.
“My suspicion is that most education professionals that resist measures like this do so because they actually like the current failing seniority and credential system, rather than emphasising actual classroom performance.”
This may also be true. However, a large part of the problem is that evaluating teachers fairly and objectively is really, really hard to do, especially when the training of teachers (constructivist methodologies) and other factors (subject matter taught, make-up of the student body) are beyond an individual teacher’s control.
I would suggest, for one, completely re-doing teacher education on the Canadian model, wherein a student gets a four-year degree in a subject and then does one extra year to be credentialed, a year which consists of one semester of classroom work and one semester of student teaching. Many of our teachers have far too many education classes and not enough of content-based classes.